Yesterday I posted how to list packages you’ve explicitly installed using yum, but some people have written in to say the command shows packages that they never explicitly installed. Some examples are, things like ModemManager and firmware packages.

I think the reason for this is that yumdb is including default and mandatory packages from when you install a group. I guess that makes sense, if you install a group then you’re telling it you want all of the packages there (but you shouldn’t get any deps).

For example, most systems probably have @hardware-support group installed, which is where ipw220-firmware comes from:$ sudo yum groupinfo hardware-support |grep ipw2200
=ipw2200-firmware